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Developing drugs for a range of tauopathies — dr leticia toledo-sherman, senior director, drug discovery, tau consortium, rainwater charitable foundation.

Dr. Leticia Toledo-Sherman is Senior Director of Drug Discovery of the Tau Consortium (https://tauconsortium.org/) for The Rainwater Charitable Foundation (https://rainwatercharitablefoundation.org/medical-research) and also holds an appointment as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology at UCLA.

Dr. Toledo-Sherman leads drug discovery activities for an international network of scientists working to develop therapies for Tauopathies, a group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the deposition of abnormal Tau protein in the brain.

Previously, Dr. Toledo-Sherman was Director of Medicinal Chemistry and Computer-Aided Drug Design at the CHDI Foundation, leading drug discovery programs for therapeutic development in Huntington’s Disease (HD). At CHDI, she also led a structural biology initiative critical to the understanding of the relationship between structure and biological function of huntingtin, the protein that when mutated causes HD.

Prior to joining CHDI, Dr. Toledo-Sherman was Executive Director of Chemistry at Lymphosign (now part of Pharmascience Inc), a privately held biotechnology company that applied rational design principles to the development of therapeutics for blood cancers. From 2000 to 2,004 she led a multi-site, multidisciplinary team using chemical proteomics and bioinformatics to discover therapeutic targets and to investigate the mechanism of action of drugs.

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Intel today announced a major update to its neuromorphic computing program, including a second-generation chip called Loihi 2 and Lava, an open-source framework for developing “neuro-inspired” applications. The company is now offering two Loihi 2-based neuromorphic systems — Oheo Gulch and Kapoho Point. They will be available through a cloud service to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) and Lava via GitHub for free.

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Intel unveiled the second generation of its neuromorphic chip and claims it will be able to solve planning and optimization problems.

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November 12 2020

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — A new machine learning algorithm, developed with Army funding, can isolate patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior and then decode it, potentially providing Soldiers with behavioral-based feedback.

“The impact of this work is of great importance to Army and DOD in general, as it pursues a framework for decoding behaviors from brain signals that generate them,” said Dr. Hamid Krim, program manager, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Develop Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. “As an example future application, the algorithms could provide Soldiers with needed feedback to take corrective action as a result of fatigue or stress.”

Brain signals contain dynamic neural patterns that reflect a combination of activities simultaneously. For example, the brain can type a message on a keyboard and acknowledge if a person is thirsty at that same time. A standing challenge has been isolating those patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior, such as finger movements.

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NASA marked a significant milestone Sept. 30 in its plans for future missions to the Moon and, eventually, Mars with completion of an RS-25 single-engine Retrofit-2 test series at Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

BepiColombo will complete its first of six Mercury flybys on October 1st. Some cameras will be operating so we’ll get some images. Some science, too.

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BepiColombo will complete its first of six Mercury flybys on October 1st. Some cameras will be operating so we’ll get some images. Some science, too.

BepiColombo made a quick visit to Venus in August and is on to its next rendezvous. On October 1st it’ll perform a flyby of Mercury, the spacecraft’s eventual destination. This visit is just a little flirtation—one of six—ahead of its eventual orbital link-up with Mercury in late 2025.

The quick visit will yield some scientific results, though, and they’ll be just a taste of what’s ahead in BepiColumbo’s one-year mission to Mercury.

BepiColombo is on a bit of a tour of the inner regions of the Solar System on its way to Mercury. The complicated route full of flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury is the only way to get the spacecraft into orbit at Mercury. BepiColombo launched in October 2018 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Then it travelled through space for a year and a half before returning to Earth for a gravity-assist manoeuvre that directed it toward Venus.

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Summary: When people engage in complex thoughts, their brain networks organize into fractal-like patterns.

Source: Dartmouth College.

Understanding how the human brain produces complex thought is daunting given its intricacy and scale. The brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons that coordinate activity through 100 trillion connections, and those connections are organized into networks that are often similar from one person to the next.

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Interesting.

Everybody knows sleep is important, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about what it actually does to the brain – and how its benefits could be boosted. To investigate, the US Army has awarded researchers at Rice University and other institutions a grant to develop a portable skullcap that can monitor and adjust the flow of fluid through the brain during sleep.

Most of us are familiar with the brain fog that comes with not getting enough sleep, but the exact processes going on in there remain mysterious. In 2012 scientists made a huge breakthrough in the field by discovering the glymphatic system, which cleans out toxic waste products from the brain during deep sleep by flushing it with cerebrospinal fluid. Disruptions to sleep – and therefore the glymphatic system – have been increasingly associated with neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

Studying the glymphatic system could provide new insights into sleep disorders and how to treat them, but currently it requires big bulky MRI machines. So the US Army is funding researchers at Rice University, Houston Methodist and Baylor College of Medicine to develop a wearable skullcap.

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